North Korea demands direct dialogue with US

NORTH KOREA’S declaration of itself as a nuclear power was intended, as it seems to have been, to shock the world and thereby pressure the United States into making unwarranted concessions, then the Bush administration responded well by playing it down. The erratic Pyongyang regime, officials pointed out, has made similar statements before. U.S. intelligence has credited the North with a couple of bombs for a decade, and in the absence of a nuclear test, there’s no way to know whether it has workable warheads. The administration is also right to dismiss, again, North Korea’s attempt to insist on bilateral negotiations with the United States.

The Bush administration’s recruitment of China, South Korea, Japan and Russia for “six-party” talks was its sole success on the Korean front in the past four years and should be preserved. The latest declaration nevertheless underlined the distressing truth that as the threat from North Korea grows steadily worse, the administration lacks an effective strategy to counter it.

Instead, the Bush administration is urging China to put pressure on the North to accept its current negotiating position in six-party talks. That is a waste of time. Knowing Pyongyang will not do something for nothing, Beijing is not about to press it until Washington puts a more equitable offer on the table.

One symptom of the problem is that the latest North Korean move took Washington and its allies by surprise. They had expected the regime of Kim Jong Il to grudgingly agree to a new round of the six-party talks next month. It’s possible, even probable, that the North wants to avoid delivering the answers it would be asked for at those talks. These include its response to an eight-month-old U.S. offer of political and economic concessions following the disclosure of its nuclear facilities, and an explanation of evidence, recently supplied by a U.S. envoy to the Asian governments, that North Korea supplied Libya with uranium suitable for processing into bomb material. Unsatisfactory answers by Pyongyang would risk alienating not only the Bush administration — which anyway may not be willing to strike a deal with Mr. Kim — but China and South Korea, which have the ability to strangle the North by cutting off supplies of food and energy or even to cause its collapse by opening their borders to refugees.

The latest turn in the nuclear crisis came after experts at the Oak Ridge laboratory reportedly concluded that uranium gas found in Libya came from North Korea. If so, that could put the North a step closer to enriching uranium, an explosive ingredient in nuclear weapons. A North Korean mine may have been the source of the suspect uranium. To be suitable for enrichment, however, that uranium has to be converted into a gas, uranium hexafluoride, which is then spun in centrifuges to separate out the U-235 used to power nuclear reactors or bombs.

Even if it made the uranium gas, North Korea is still years away from manufacturing enough centrifuges to mass-produce highly enriched uranium for bombs, according to US intelligence. That allows the time it will take to negotiate a detailed agreement to eliminate the North’s enrichment program verifiably.

The objective there would be to impose international sanctions to persuade North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to abandon his weapons program. In Sapporo, Japan, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi came down firmly against that idea Friday. He said economic sanctions against the North could end any possibility that Pyongyang might rejoin the six-nation talks and end any chance of their success.

“I understand the feelings behind growing calls for economic sanctions, but dialogue and pressure are important,” Koizumi told reporters. Han Sung Ryol, a senior North Korean diplomat at the United Nations, urged a direct dialogue with the United States in an interview with a South Korean newspaper.

But in a subsequent interview, he appeared to backtrack, telling Associated Press Television News, “No, we do not ask for bilateral talks.” He said the key issue for North Korea was whether the United States planned to attack North Korea. The United States has said repeatedly in recent years that it has no such plans and is intent on seeking a diplomatic solution. On Thursday, the North Korean Foreign Ministry declared that the country had produced nuclear weapons and said it was calling off participation in the six-nation talks.